White Beech: The Rainforest Years (36 page)

Though he was not the first botanist to describe Australian flora, Brown has a pretty good claim to being the best. His grasp of plant anatomy was unparalleled, partly because of his innovative use of microscopic examination. He was also unusually self-effacing. When a rival botanist supplied a good name for a new genus Brown made no bones about accepting it. To study the whole list of plant names authorised by Brown is to realise that for the most part he bucked the trend of using plant names to oblige his colleagues and superiors. He preferred to name his plants for themselves; he gave the Bolwarra the scientific name
Eupomatia
, ‘eu’ meaning ‘pleasing’ and ‘pomatia’ referring to the pixie cap of the flowerbud. The type he called
E. laurina
, meaning like a laurel, referring to its leaves. Forty years later, when Victorian government botanist Ferdinand Mueller was sent the Small Bolwarra collected by Charles Moore, he typically named it for George Bennett,
E. bennettii
. Bennett, an Englishman who travelled extensively before settling in Australia in 1836, when he went into medical practice in Sydney, was a founding member of the Australian Museum, the Acclimatisation Society and the Zoological Society (
ADB
).

Brown was obliged to name another large proteaceous genus
Grevillea
in memory of the algologist Charles Francis Greville, one of the founders of the Royal Horticultural Society, because the name had already been published by Joseph Knight. How this came about is a tale of the kind of skulduggery that is not expected of scholars and gentlemen. Knight worked as head gardener for a gentleman botanist called George Hibberd, who had fallen for the new fad of growing proteaceous plants. In 1809 Knight published
On the Cultivation of the Plants belonging to the natural order of Protëeae
which, as well as providing ten pages or so of instructions for the successful growing of Proteaceae, included a revised taxonomy for the group. This taxonomy had been copied down by Robert Salisbury from a lecture given by Robert Brown to the Linnaean Society, and published by Knight before the text of Brown’s lecture could be published in the
Transactions of the Linnaean Society
. For this piece of piracy Salisbury was ostracised by the botanical fraternity, but nothing could alter the fact that Knight had published before Brown, and so we read that the genus
Grevillea
is ‘R. Br. ex Knight’, even though Knight had been unable to name or describe the type specimen which was in fact Brown’s
Grevillea gibbosa
, the Bushman’s Clothes-peg (Brown, 1810b, 375). Within the genus
Grevillea
Brown remembered Banks, Bauer, Baxter, Caley, Cunningham and Dryander. He also named a monotypic genus
Bellendena
after Sir John Bellenden Ker.

As a man without liberal education who had no Latin, Brown’s colleague George Caley, who was otherwise an expert botanist, was never permitted to publish under his own name. Though he was a rather morose individual who often made life difficult for Brown, Brown made sure he was not forgotten by naming a small genus of flying duck orchids after him,
Caleana
. Brown named four more species for Caley as well, a Grevillea, a Banksia, a Persoonia and an Anadenia. To another Grevillea and another Banksia Brown gave the specific epithet
goodii
, in honour of the gardener on the
Investigator
, Peter Good, whose job it was to tend any live plants being taken back to England, and make sure that the collected seed remained viable. Good had died of dysentery shortly after the
Investigator
docked in Port Jackson in 1803; the plants to which Brown gave his name are his only memorial
(Brown, 1810b, 1:174)

Brown collected the plant we now call Brunonia, but he did not name it after himself. Sir James Edward Smith, lecturer in botany at Guy’s Hospital, who had acquired all Linnaeus’s collections after his death in 1778, chose the name but, because Brown published it in his
Prodromus
in 1810, before Smith’s paper was published in the
Transactions of the Linnaean Society
, he is credited as the author (Smith, 1811, 366). The name Brownia has never been used so there was no need to latinise it as Brunonia. In 1863 Ferdinand Mueller attempted to confer Brown’s name on the Australian Flintwood, which Brown had originally collected on the Hunter River (
Fragmenta
, 3:17, 11). Mueller had originally identified his specimen as a Phoberos as described by Loureiro, and named it
Phoberos brownii
; by 1863 he reclassified it as a Scolopia, but he was not able to retain his original species name
brownii
because of an odd circumstance. In June 1854 German botanist Johann Friedrich Klotzsch had come upon a specimen of the same species in the herbarium of the Berlin Botanical Garden marked ‘patria ignota’. Klotzsch described it, named it
Adenogyrus braunii
for his friend and colleague Alexander Carl Friedrich Braun, and the name was published the same year (Fischer and Meyer). The genus name was not good but there was no way of removing the specific epithet, so
Scolopia braunii
it is and ever will be. Botanists who treat
braunii
as if it were a variant spelling of
brownii
(and they include the great Floyd) are simply wrong.
Scolopia braunii
is a wonderful slow-growing tree with glossy lozenge-shaped leaves and scented flowers; it is a real shame that it was not named for the best botanist of them all. At one stage the Queensland Kauri was being referred to as ‘
Agathis brownii
’, but that name too was without authority (Mabberley, 2002). That still leaves more than 150 plant species with the specific name
brownii
, nearly all of them named by younger generations of botanists who are all aware of how much we owe to Robert Brown. One of the earliest plants named for Brown is
Banksia brownii
, which was collected by William Baxter at King George’s Sound in 1829; it is now facing imminent extinction in its native habitat in south-west Western Australia.

Brown is the original collector of many Cave Creek natives. Some he was able to name with purely descriptive names in the peculiar mixture of Latin and Greek that is called botanical Latin: the genera
Asplenium
and
Cryptocarya
,
Aneilema biflorum
,
A. acuminatum
,
Adiantum formosum
,
Alpinia caerulea
,
Alyxia ruscifolia
,
Gymnostachys anceps
. There was nothing Brown could do to stop the Cave Creek
Commelina
commemorating Jan and Caspar Commelijn, because Linnaeus had already named the genus in 1753, but typically he chose a descriptive epithet,
cyanea
– blue. Our Koda belongs to a genus named in 1756
Ehretia
for the great botanical artist Georg Dionysius Ehret, and again Brown applied a descriptive epithet,
acuminata
. Brown listed
Olea paniculata
, an important member of our plant community, which had been tentatively named ‘
Ligustrum arboreum
’ by the botanists on the
Endeavour
. He also named
Clerodendrum floribundum
and
Callicarpa pedunculata
. Brown also identified
Pseuderanthemum variabile
, tentatively labelled ‘
Iusticia umbratilis
’. And so on, to the end of the alphabet.

Though Alan Cunningham and Charles Frazer accomplished much less than Brown, at Cave Creek their names crop up every day, Frazer’s being usually and apparently incorrectly spelt as ‘Fraser’ (
ADB
). Cunningham was a gardener’s son, who found work in 1810 as a cataloguer of Banks’s collections at Kew. When the post of travelling plant collector was advertised in 1814, Banks encouraged Cunningham to apply and he was duly appointed. After travelling in South America, he arrived in Port Jackson in 1816, the same year that Frazer arrived in New South Wales as a soldier. Within a year Frazer had been appointed Superintendent of the Botanic Gardens and first Colonial Botanist. Both men joined John Oxley’s expeditions to north-eastern New South Wales in 1818, and in 1828 they accompanied Captain Patrick Logan’s expedition from Brisbane south to Mount Barney in the McPherson Range, which was named by Cunningham after Major Duncan McPherson, an officer in the 39th regiment. Bentham credits Frazer as the original collector of more than 230 New South Wales species. Our most spectacular rosewood is
Dysoxylum
fraserianum
and the sandpaper fig,
Ficus fraseri
, is one of the most important trees for our fruit-eating birds.

Cunningham’s memory haunts the treescape; the Hoop Pine,
Araucaria cunninghamii
, the Bangalow Palm,
Archontophoenix cunninghamiana
, the local Casuarina,
Allocasuarina cunninghamiana
, the Native Tamarind,
Diploglottis cunninghamii
, the Brown Beech,
Pennantia cunninghamii
, are all named for him. Lately Cunningham has been losing some of his titles;
Diploglottis cunninghamii
is now to be called
D. australis
,
Clerodendron cunninghamii
C. longiflorum
var.
glabrum
,
Cryptocarya cunninghamii
C. macdonaldii
, but then
Kreysigia multiflora
was renamed
Tripladenia
cunninghamii
, so what Cunningham lost on the roundabouts he made up on a swing. In 1831 Cunningham went back to England, to join the other botanists working on the 200 boxes of Australian specimens he had sent to the Kew herbarium. He published little, and it would probably be unfair to suggest that it was he who called some of the most frequently encountered species in the McPherson Range after himself. One thing he did do was to ensure that a ‘majestic bluff’ encountered on Oxley’s earlier expedition was named after George Caley.

Even more important than Robert Brown in arriving at an authoritative account of the Australian flora is another gentleman amateur, George Bentham (
DNB
). Bentham was virtually self-educated; he became interested in botany when his father moved his household to France in 1816, eventually settling near Montpellier. He diverted himself by applying the logical principles developed by his uncle Jeremy Bentham to anything that interested him. He was impressed by the analytical tables for plant identification that he found in Augustin Pyramus de Candolle’s
Flore française
and began to apply them to his own botanising. On a visit to London in 1823 he made his first contact with British botanists. In 1831 his father died, and in 1832 his uncle; Bentham inherited from both. As a gentleman of independent means he could now spend all his time botanising. In 1836 he published his first work of systematic botany,
Labiatarum genera et species
, for which he had visited every European herbarium at least once. He then travelled to Vienna to study legumes, and produced
De leguminosarum generibus commentationes
, which was published in the annals of the Vienna Museum. He went on to collaborate with De Candolle on the
Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis
, producing descriptions of 4,730 species.

In 1855 Bentham had all but decided to retire from botanical work when the elder Hooker and other members of the botanical establishment persuaded him to move to London and work on the preparation of the floras of the British colonies using the collections at Kew. In 1862 or so he began work on the
Flora Australiensis
; it was to take him fifteen years. Bentham is honoured in the naming of the Red Carabeen,
Geissois benthamii
and a native gardenia,
Atractocarpus benthamianus
. (The genus
Atractocarpus
has been through an extraordinary succession of names:
Sukunia
,
Trukia
,
Porterandia
,
Sulitia
,
Neofranciella
,
Franciella
and
Randia
; as it has been
Atractocarpus
only since 1999, the name might not have jelled yet.)

Though they had established a formidable presence elsewhere, German naturalists were late arrivals in Australia. In 1842 the naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt arrived in Sydney from Germany and began collecting botanical specimens in north-eastern New South Wales. In November 1843 ‘in silvis ad amnem Myall Creek Australiae orientalis subtropicae’, Leichhardt collected, amongst much else, the first recorded specimen of White Beech. In October 1844 he led an expedition from Jimbour on the Darling Downs to Port Essington near Darwin, and got there fifteen months later. On this trip he collected thousands of specimens but, as his horses and oxen perished one by one, he had no way of transporting the material back to civilisation and had to dump it. In December 1846 he set out to travel from Dalby on the Darling Downs across to the west coast, but was driven back by heavy rain, malaria and shortage of food (Bailey, J., 267–323).